Revision as of 11:45, 25 December 2005

Introduction

You will find a Search Engine "box" on every article/web page here. Enter a search term into that box and click either the "Go" or "Search" button below that box. The "Go" feature leads you directly to the sole article with the exact title of your search term. But if no article exists containing the exact title of your search term, you will instead get a list of articles containing your search term. The "Search" feature likewise provides you a list of all articles containing your search term. You can narrow or broaden the scope of articles searched by clicking on the various boxes at the bottom of the "search results" page.

This search feature is an extremely useful tool. Not only can you locate a particular boxer’s page by entering his/her name in the search box, but all other references made to that boxer in any other BoxRec Encyclopedia article--including all other images, if any, of that boxer. Or maybe you want to learn what boxers Jack Kearns managed. Put his name in the search field, and see what articles appear.

Of course, the search engine is not limited to finding boxers' pages. You can also locate text and images of countless other subjects--such as boxing venues, magazines, and so forth. As with the example mentioned above--of searching for all other article references to a particular boxer--you can find any other page references to the subject you have entered into the search box.

What Links Here: Also consider clicking on the "What Links Here" link, found in the "Toolbox" section of every page.

Search Engine Limitations:

The search engine limits its search to articles/web pages within this BoxRec Boxing Encyclopedia. It does not search other Wikipedia articles.

Nor does it search the BoxRec.com database. (The BoxRec database is primarily a compilation of Fight Records of professional boxers; it also contains "records" of referees, judges, and promoters.) To search the BoxRec.com database via a number of options, you should go to its Home Page. Explanations of the various BoxRec search options are provided on our BoxRec.com page. If you are searching this Encyclopedia for a particular boxer, and his/her name does not appear in the results, that probably means a page had not yet been created for that person. However, s/he may be in the BoxRec database. So, you should consider doing a name search there. (But, again, that database concerns professional boxers only--not purely amateur or bare-knuckle boxers, who are included in this Boxing Encyclopedia.)

The search engine ignores text generated as a result of inserting the "fight code." (The fight code is described in detail on the Help Page.) When an Editor inserts the "fight code" into a page here, that code automatically generates the date of the bout, venue and location, opponents, and result. Such as: 2004-04-10 : Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV, USA : Lamon Brewster beat Wladimir Klitschko by TKO in round 5 of 12.... The search engine ignores (cannot "read") this text when performing a search. So, someone performing a search for bouts that occurred at "Mandalay Bay"--by inserting those words into the search box--will not get any page results where those words were generated by fight code.

The same thing holds true for text generated by "boxer codes"--also described in detail on the Help Page. The search engine will ignore a boxer's hometown of "Bethnal Green" in his profile, for example, if that text phrase was created by an Editor entering only a boxer code.

Basic Search Tips

Borrowed & adapted from the main Wikipedia Site

The ENTER Key
Pressing the [Enter] key while the search field is active is equivalent to clicking on the [Go] button. While this is obvious when using Internet Explorer (tested on version 6), Mozilla (version 1.6 at least) provides no such indication.

Limiting results
Wikipedia's default search mode will turn up results with any of the words in your query. For instance, the phrase "search engine" turns up many results containing only "search" but not "engine"; or only "engine" but not "search"; in addition to the ones you probably wanted, which contain both words.

To limit the search to results that include all words, put a plus sign "+" at the beginning of each word: +search +engine returns only pages containing both words, like Google's default mode.

You can also do a phrase search by enclosing words in quotes: "search engine" turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order.

To exclude results that include some word, put a minus sign "-" at the beginning: search -engine

Phrase
There is no method for searching for a phrase. Contrary to what you might expect, enclosing phrases in double quotation marks such as "Young Dutch Sam" will retrieve all pages containing "Sam" "Dutch" and "Young".

Avoid Short & Common Words
If your search terms include a common "stop word" (such as "the", "one", "your", "more", "right", "while", "when", "who", "which", "such", "every", "about") it will be ignored by the search system. If you're trying to do a phrase search or all-words-only search, this may result in returning nothing at all. Short numbers, and words that appear in half of all articles, will also not be found. In this case, drop those words and rerun the search.

Search is case-insensitive only for the first word of the entry
The searches for "broadway", "Broadway" and "BROADWAY" all return the same results. If a multi-word article has a name including a mixture of capitalized letters in any word other than the first, searching is not case insensitive. For example, consider the article Fighter of the Year. A search for "fighter of the year" will not find this article. However, a search for "fighter of the Year" will find it. Wiki Redirects can be used to work around this problem. For example, searches for any capitalization variant of "Marquis of Queensbury Rules" will match the "Marquis of queensbury rules" page which redirects the user to the actual article named "Marquis of Queensbury Rules."